The
continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s
has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space
settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit
about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected
work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or
under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The
most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones
that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result
of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and
knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating
space habitat systems.

Introduction.

Most
people attending this conference want to see space settlement happen.
It would be preaching to the converted to speak, for example, about how
self-replicating Bernal spheres (J.D.
Bernal, 1928, "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Three Enemies of
the Rational Soul") might house a trillion humans across the
solar system by 3000 AD through exponential growth (making nonsense of
projections of limits to growth), or how humanity might terraform Mars
over an even longer time period, or of how technological and social
spin-offs from space studies might benefit humanity here on Earth in
the short term (as they already have). We all know these things. What
we are all looking for is ways to collaborate with like-minded
individuals in the grand endeavor of space settlement.

At
this moment nearly every engineer on earth has a powerful and globally
networked computer in his or her home. Collaborative volunteer efforts
are now possible on an unprecedented scale. Moores's Law predicts
continued reductions (see for example the writings of Raymond Kurzweil
at http://www.kurzweilai.net/ or Hans Moravec at http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm)
in the cost of bandwidth, storage, CPU power, and displays - which will
lead to computers a million times faster, bigger or cheaper in the next
few decades. Collaboration software such as for sending email, holding
real-time video conferences, and viewing design drawings is also
reducing in cost; much of it is now effectively free. This means there
are now few technical or high-cost barriers to cooperation among
engineers, many of whom even now have in their homes (often merely for
game playing reasons) computing power and bandwidth beyond anything
available to the best equipped engineers in the 1970s.

However,
the internet is already littered with abandoned collaborative projects.
Productive collaboration requires more than technology; it requires the
sustained energy of many positive contributions and interactions, which
arise from common goals and mutual trust. The refinement of commonly
shared purposes and principles takes time and work. Intellectual
property licensing is often overlooked, primarily because collaborators
would rather be working toward a common goal than arguing legal issues.
An appropriate licensing strategy based on a shared purpose and
principles helps to build and maintain trust and promote spontaneous
participation. But there are many licensing options, each with
compelling arguments for its use, making it difficult for collaborators
to choose the best licensing strategy for their needs. In the long
term, these issues can make or break a collaborative effort. It is our
hope that more spontaneous productive collaboration will occur if the
entire space-settlement community is better informed on these issues.

Fostering cooperation

Past efforts in space settlement have focused on the role of government (NASA http://www.nasa.gov)
or large commercial entities (GE, Boeing) in developing space
settlements. More recent efforts have focused on bootstrapping private
or non-profit efforts (SpaceDev, SpaceHab, LunaCorp http://www.lunacorp.com,
Artemis) which might lead to the development of space settlements
someday. However, the reality is that given today's economic and
political mythology, space settlement is not and will not soon be a
priority.

How
does the individual space enthusiast fit into this picture? Most often,
he or she is seen as a lobbying agent for Congress, an individual
investor, a dues-paying member of a non-profit society, or even a
torch-bearer carrying on the flame to a new generation. These roles are
important, but they only indirectly impact technological advances
leading to space settlement. By contrast, the fields of astronomy and
paleontology have in recent years undergone a revolution in working
with talented amateurs. For example, large numbers of comets and
asteroids have been detected by amateur astronomers, some of whom have
better equipment than some professionals.

We
believe that thousands of individuals (such as the people at this
conference) are ready and willing to make compromises in their own
lives to nurture the space settlement dream at the grassroots level -
but in a more direct way than has been attempted thus far. In
particular, individuals could collaborate on the iterative development
of detailed space habitat designs and simulations using nothing more
than the computers they already have at home for playing games. While
excellent progress has been made on the general engineering design of
space habitats (in terms of basic physics and proof-of-concept
projects), many of the details remain to be worked out. There have been
individual attempts in some of these areas (e.g., the SSI Matrix
effort), but a persistent collaborative community has not yet coalesced
around constructing a comprehensive and non-proprietary library of such
details.

What
sort of things could such a far-flung collaboration produce? We
envision a collaboratively developed and universally available library http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak
of detailed CAD files, simulations and scenarios that describe the
required manufacturing processes, products and machines, ecological web
management practices, and means for bootstrapping space settlements
from asteroidal, lunar, or Martian ore. For example, such a library
could form the knowledge component of a self-replicating space habitat
system capable of duplicating itself from asteroidal ores and sunlight
like a huge algae cell in space, such as was envisioned by J.D. Bernal
in the 1920s.

One
reason more cooperation on such a library hasn't happened to date is
that the various societies people support have (seemingly) very
different objectives. For example, numerous space-settlement related
efforts (such as SSI, the Mars Society http://www.marssociety.org, the Living Universe Foundation http://www.luf.org, PERMANENT http://www.permanent.com, and the Artemis Project http://www.asi.org)
each have a different approach towards space settlement. Since so many
bright people want similar things, the question arises of how we can
work together to help all of these projects develop. Rather than argue
whether L5 or Mars or the asteroids or the Moon or the rings of Saturn
should be humankind's first space settlement, we could be asking what
is common between those efforts so that that groundwork can be shared.

The open source example

Consider
a few examples of direct collaborative creation from the "open source”
and "free software" communities: Linux, Apache, Sendmail, GCC, Python,
Squeak, Tek, Emacs, Forth, DrScheme, Slashdot http://www.slashdot.org, Everything2 http://www.everything2.org, DMOZ http://dmoz.org (the Open Directory Project), SETI-at-home, the Educational Object Economy http://www.eoe.org, and SourceForge http://sourceforge.net.
All of these are examples of user communities that have spontaneously
grown around some sort of technical artifact such as an application,
web site, or programming language. These projects together include
hundreds of thousands of participants. SourceForge alone has over
153,000 registered developers and 19,000 open source projects.

Think
of what the space settlement community could accomplish in terms of
detailed designs with just a few hundred intensely cooperating people
over the course of a decade, let alone what 153,000 could accomplish in
that same time. But what if we could get a comparable group of people
across the Earth involved in a project like space settlement in their
spare time? With a viable set of designs, the space settlement dream
would be ready to go if somehow a billion dollars were to make itself
available, say to actually build and launch an automated seed to
construct a space habitat out of a near-earth asteroid (complete with a
space shuttle fleet to land on Earth and pick up residents, similar to
an idea arising from the 1980s NASA summer study).

But
frankly, a billion dollars is not enough to design such a thing. It
might take a trillion dollars of design and simulation work to get to
the point where there would be a high likelihood that only a billion
dollars would be enough to make something like that physically happen.
At typical engineer costs of $300K per person year including overhead,
we are talking about needing roughly 300,000 person-years of design
effort to get to the point where only a billion dollars stands in the
way of the first self-replicating space settlement. Or, ten years of
300,000 people around the world working on the project in four hours of
their spare time each week. That's only double the number of developers
registered on SourceForge, and many of them put a lot more than four
hours a week into their projects.

Probably
the average person who might participate in such an endeavor already
spends four hours a week watching Star Trek and Babylon 5. If we could
make the project as captivating as those television shows, we might
have a functioning space settlement by the beginning of the next
decade. Commercial efforts like Ultima Online already have tens of
thousands of users who pay on a monthly basis to participate in virtual
worlds. This is not to say that there have been no collaborative
efforts in the space settlement community; but it is to say that we
feel the potential is much greater than what has been realized thus far.

Participation

There are two levels at which we can look for participation: the individual and the organizational levels.

At
the individual level, participants could include retired engineers,
practicing engineers, hobbyists, dedicated members of existing space
organizations, home schoolers, K-12 students, college students,
graduate students, teachers, faculty, independent scholars, open source
software developers, non-profit staff members, and government
employees. To an extent, this group already cooperates by generating
the large volume of messages on the sci.space.* newsgroups. These
individuals might have many different reasons for participating, which
might include a deep interest in the subject, a desire to learn, a
desire to demonstrate technical ability, a desire for sociality, and a
desire to give back to the community. On the other hand, specific
issues might frustrate individual desires to contribute. These might
include limited time, limited interest, limited attention, limited
inspiration, limited value returned by the effort, social pressures not
to contribute, and restrictive agreements with employers. In the past,
cathedral builders would work on cathedrals for generations, handing
work down from parent to offspring. In our world today, widespread
patience of this magnitude seems hard to imagine.

At the organizational level, participants might include the Space Studies Institute http://www.ssi.org,
the Living Universe Foundation, the Artemis project, the Mars Society,
and other existing organizations with interest in space settlement
issues. The United Nations, the World Bank, IBM, NASA, General
Electric, Boeing, Verizon, and various other non-profits and for-profit
enterprises might also participate to the extent that a part of the
effort aligns with their immediate interests or needs. These
organizations will tend to participate for such reasons as good
publicity, access to potential employees, an immediate need for a
specific piece of technology only the collaboration can support, or a
desire to level the playing field to reduce competitors' proprietary
strengths (such as is for example one factor behind IBM's support of
Linux). On the other hand, specific issues might frustrate
organizational desires to contribute. These might include fear of
losing members or employees, fear of legal ramifications such as
liability, and fear of spending limited resources on projects seemingly
outside of their charter and over which they have limited control.

Let
us take it as a given that of the people and organizations who might be
able to participate, at least a fraction will find the benefits of
contributing exceed the costs and that a number of participants will
step forth. At that point other issues related to interactions between
participants may arise that limit successful collaboration. These
include clashes of individual egos, lack of trust, incompatible
licenses for various works produced, limited bandwidth for
communications, lack of agreement on open standards, lack of tools,
lack of agreement on purpose and principles of operation, disagreement
over possible financial returns, lack of supporters outside the direct
effort, liability issues for contributions, the need for private space
for individual achievement, active disruption by vested interests, a
culture that promotes individual success over group success, and an
outdated model of the "lone genius" working in isolation.

Overcoming
or at least minimizing the impact of these interaction issues requires
attention to organizational form and intellectual property licensing
agreements. Let us now consider three models of increasing complexity
of intellectual property (IP) production - the independent scholar, the
centralized production group, and the collective association - and
their implications for licensing.

Individual IP production

The
simplest way new IP is produced is that a person reads a variety of
documents, thinks about the ideas remembered from those documents, and
then creates some new artifact embodying the derived ideas such as a
document. Since copyright only covers ideas in tangible form (such as
text), this effort is currently legal. Issues could still arise, such
as when a person's memory is accurate enough to create exact copies, or
where the individual explicitly plagiarizes, but these are rare. Most
of the individual's own internal communications don't produce any
artifacts, and those that are produced (like index cards with notes)
are obviously owned by the individual.

For
direct use of texts and other tangibles, the legal doctrine of "fair
use" is involved. Fair use is a complex topic, but as a rough guide,
fair use typically involves including only small parts of a larger work
as a small part of a new whole. Of course, nothing is ever completely
original because all works draw from a stock of words and ideas that
have been collaboratively developed by humans over the past thousands
of years. To reduce the risk of plagiarism and to facilitate an economy
of reference and prestige based on citation, academic scholars
formalize the individual IP creation process, for example by placing
ideas as they are encountered onto index cards, by footnoting the
original source of an idea discussed in a new work, and by adhering to
explicit fair use standards.

The
world wide web has greatly changed individual IP production, because
linking to original source materials reduces the need to directly
include portions of the works cited. Generally permission is not
required to include a web link (URL) to a document in another document.
A link includes the cited material in the new work, but in an indirect
way that makes the cited material immediately available while skirting
some of the legal issues of direct inclusion. This creates a
quantitative change in speed of access to related works, which in turn
creates a qualitative difference in the way documents such as emails
and web pages are produced and used. Exactly how links may be legally
used (based on how the linked work is represented) is a matter of
continued legal review. And there is still value in direct inclusion.
Many links eventually break; and if the new work requires direct
revision of included works (texts, sounds, CAD files, or images),
linking is not a sufficient method of inclusion.

Centralized IP production

A
more complex way of producing IP is to get a group of people together,
typically as employees of a corporation, but possibly also as members
of any form of centralized organization. Unlike the case of individuals
basically talking to themselves or writing notes to themselves, these
individuals will express themselves to others with typically tangible
documents (e.g., notes or email). Other individuals will receive these
documents and then create new works.

In
this model, typically individual employees or members sign agreements
assigning most or all rights to the IP they produce to the ownership of
the central body. So a large pool of documents can be produced by a
large pool of people and persist over time as individuals come and go.
Because all the work is owned by one immortal and non-human entity,
there is little need to be concerned about the legal status of internal
communications or derivations from them, as long as all the
contributors sign over their intellectual property to the central body.
The central body is able to make decisions about how to apply its
intellectual property without needing to consult individual
contributors.

Typically
such entities construct internal legal boundaries and policies for
treating externally-owned intellectual material, typically by avoiding
it, or failing that, paying to obtain an explicit license for the
entity to include it in its internal operations under specific rules.
Even non-profit entities like the Free Software Foundation http://www.fsf.org
(FSF) may use this model. For example, all developers of FSF GNU
software explicitly grant copyright to the FSF, which as owner can then
legally defend the software or ensure it can interoperate under
whatever future licensing terms it wishes to issue. To insure
integrity, the FSF broadly admonishes its contributors not to
plagiarize other works.

Collective IP production

Now
consider the case of collaborators who do not all work for the same
company and have not all signed an agreement assigning their IP to a
single owner. This is the most likely configuration for the thousands
of individuals who would like to collaborate on a space settlement
design library. To the extent that each individual in such a group acts
as an independent scholar (translating copyrighted material into ideas
in their head and then back into original materials), the community may
proceed on a legal basis without a need for licensing. They may, for
example, distribute documents only to peers, who use the documents only
by reading them and thinking about them. This is similar to the model
that underlies much of scientific publication.

There
are obvious limits to this approach when attempting to apply it to the
collaborative development of technical artifacts. For example,
community participants often want to include parts of other
contributors' efforts in their works (say by quoting part of an email
in a new email to someone else). Sometimes this is covered by "fair
use"; but for significantly large uses it will not be. Collaborators
may even want to collaborate so closely and in such a fine-grained way
(say by alternately editing the same document) that it may become
unclear what part of the contribution is made by either party, or
whether a clean distinction should be made at all, such as when a
paragraph is partially written multiple times, creating a chain of
derived works. As another example, a complex CAD file might be modified
on numerous occasions by numerous people.

Of
course, many collaborators informally share authorship of works.
However, this can create complicated legal tangles of which
contributors should be aware. In order for the combined work to be
legally redistributed, all authors must agree on how it may be used. In
addition, if contributors want others to be able to safely make derived
works from the collaborative product, all authors must take pains to
make sure the product has a clearly titled legal pedigree. Explicit
licenses governing contributions minimize the likelihood of such
problems arising. If all contributors do not agree (ideally before
collaborating) that the result will be licensed under specific terms,
the work product will be a dead end as far as continued improvements by
others.

If
contributions are structured in a modular way, such that clear
boundaries exist, then each module may have its own license. However,
on a practical basis, only certain types of contributions may be
practically treated as modules, such as complete documents, program
files, CAD files, and so on. And if modules have conflicting licenses,
or licenses that don't permit derived works, then continued
collaboration may be made more difficult. Common agreed-upon licenses
within collaborative communities can prevent the need for a chain of
licenses to accompany each copyrighted work and its derived works as it
progresses through a network of authors.

Note
that if all collaborators continually put their new works into the
public domain on creation, this problem of needing to worry about
licenses does not occur. However, authors usually do not do this for
various reasons. Typically they want to protect their creative
expression from incorporation into other works in ways they do not
approve of or in ways that do not compensate them financially or
otherwise.

Authors
may distribute new copies or versions of existing works under new
licenses. However, on a practical basis, large groups of authors rarely
change the license of a finished product because all participating
authors would have to agree to the new terms. For this reason it is
important to get the license right the first time.

Termites and collective organizational forms

Termites build their nests through “chaordic” http://www.chaordic.org
self-organization based on simple rules For more details and an
interesting perspective on applying these ideas to management, see
Gareth Morgan: http://www.imaginiz.com/provocative/organize/termites.html.
Individual termites build short stacks of grains of sand. Eventually
two stacks fall against each other to make an arch. The termites near
the arch become excited and build on the arch until it becomes a
tunnel. Eventually these tunnels link up to build huge nests that may
last for decades.

The
termite model is worth thinking about in the context of individuals
collaborating to build a design for a space settlement. Many projects
begin by attempting to build a pre-architected nest in a top-down
fashion. What they discover is that none of the termites want to build
what has been laid out. A bottom-up termite-like approach might work
better to attract collaborators. It is less risky for collaborators to
build their own little piles the way they like, and to then offer the
results under terms they choose to the rest of the world (which accepts
or rejects it as the world sees fit), than it is to build a custom part
they have less interest in as part of a grand design which may or may
not ever be complete enough to use. The simple rules of termite
interaction make it possible for a giant termite nest to arise from the
efforts of individuals. Agreements in any collaborative community
perform a similar function. Without the right agreements, all you will
have is a lot of little piles of sand, not a nest the whole community
can use.

What we need are some good rules for any
space settlement project so we can be good space settlement termites.
Intellectual property licensing issues are the most important rules in
creating collaborative works. More than anything, one should do
everything possible to avoid creating well intentioned rules that
diminish this sort of self-organizing behavior.

Intellectual Property Issues

Intellectual
Property (IP) includes things like copyrights, patents, trade secrets,
and trademarks. These are legal and social constructions that reflect
the dominant societal myths about motivation and cooperation; and they
have changed over time. Many ancient cultures did not believe the
individual had any right to their creative ideas or expressions. Such
ideas were considered to be given by a god or inspired by a muse and
were to be used by any and all. In the U.S. Constitution, copyrights
and patents were created not because it was thought people had the
right to own information, but to “promote the progress of science and
useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” Thus
copyrights and patents were actually created to increase the store of
public domain knowledge. This is as opposed to the generally accepted
belief in the U.S.A. of a right to own land or tools. (Trade secrets
and trademarks are more similar to "owned" things, since they may in
theory be held privately forever.)

Under
U.S. laws, as a supposed incentive to engage in a creative endeavor,
the owner of intellectual property may decide under what terms it may
be licensed by others. That is, the owner may extend some of their
exclusive rights to copy or use something to another for some
consideration or none at all. The owner may also attempt to impose
conditions on subsequent transfers of the intellectual property, or
attempt to prevent such transfers to another party entirely. We are
used to the concept of being able to buy a book and sell it (as a used
book) to someone else. The internet challenges some of these
traditions; for example, many e-book licenses don't allow you to resell
an e-book.

Under
current laws, all created information (even this document) will at some
point enter the public domain. It may take 100 years or more in some
cases, but it will happen. The long-term constitutional intent of
copyright and patent law is to increase the public domain store of
knowledge. Unfortunately, however, copyright and patent owners have
repeatedly lobbied for extensions of copyrights, the latest success
being the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Some argue
that the rise of the internet implies the opposite - that copyrights
and patents should be instead shortened to a decade or less in order to
promote the kind of cooperation that the internet makes possible.

Various projects like Project Gutenberg http://sailor.gutenberg.org
are doing a great job of taking works that have fallen out of copyright
and making them accessible on-line. On a practical near-term basis, the
only way to provide a large quantity of current technical information
in the public domain or under open source licenses would be through a
large group effort, either obtaining permission one item at a time (and
coordinating those permissions) or creating new material.

Distinguishing code, content, and collection

Any
sufficiently complex project will generate at least three different
types of copyrighted materials which may be licensable: code, content,
and collection. “Code” refers to actual executable programs and source;
“content” refers to ideas and concepts crystallized in email, video,
transcripts and other documents; and “collection” refers to specific
compilations of code and content with perhaps an index or other
organization and structure. For example, a development effort related
to space habitats might produce both simulations (code) and numerous
emails discussing them (content). Further, the effort might create a
CD-ROM collection of selected simulations and email discussions related
to them, along with an associated index.

These
three types of material do not all have to be under the same license.
Even for each type, items in it do not necessarily all have to be under
the same license. For code, some could be distributed under the GPL
license and some under the BSD license. For content, manuals might
require attribution under an open content license, email might require
inclusion without alteration, and a page of links might be placed in
the public domain. For collections, multiple collections might be
released, each with a different license - perhaps one restricting
redistribution without payment and another allowing redistribution of
subsets of the database. Cooperating individuals and organizations
should decide what licenses they want to use for code, content, and
collection and make a commitment to placing materials under those
licenses.

Choosing appropriate licenses

So
the first two large questions for any effort to develop IP related to
space settlement are: (1) How many different systems embodying
collections of code and content will there be, and will all these
systems be under the same license? (2) For any given system, will the
three areas (code, content, collection) be under different licenses?

In
addition to those two large questions, for all licenses to be chosen or
written, here are some smaller questions. Will the licenses provide any
warranty? Are derived works allowed? How viral will they be, or what
parts will be viral? Will they restrict distributions to any class of
user? Will they require legal restrictions on distribution or use? Do
they require making explicit the originality or IP status of
contributions? What will they say about patents embodied or described?
Will they require attribution or limit modifications or removal of
opinions? Will there be special classes of contributors who have more
rights than others? Are there restrictions related to advertising? Who
could be sued if something goes wrong? How are creation dates
maintained to know when parts go into the public domain? Will there be
a provision that suggestions from users can be added to the product?
How will these licenses interact with existing licenses? Will the
licenses include a termination clause?

There
are obvious answers to many of these questions based on the desire to
minimize risk to the person or group granting the license. These are
typically reflected in most open source licenses, such as the X/MIT
license. A large issue, which can be seen to divide open source
collaboration into two camps (GPL vs. BSD/MIT/Python, etc.), is whether
the license should contain a "viral" provision for "infecting" derived
code or content.

Licensing
issues can be divisive and one needs to tread carefully. Any
sufficiently large project may end up using a variety of material
licensed under a variety of terms. Also, under what we call a “termite”
model empowering individuals, it is likely that individual contributors
will make new material available under a variety of terms. The proper
handling of these materials will have to be part of the principles of
any group. One value of the GPL license (despite its drawbacks) is both
that it is widely known and that it makes the licensing of derived
works clear. This lessens the burden of having to negotiate new
licenses for every contribution, having to make assumptions about the
license status of each minor contribution, or having to educate every
contributor about licenses in detail. [Update: Some more details on licensing issues were earlier discussed by one of us on a mailing list post archived here.]

The
decision-making process in licensing must be collective, in part to
compensate for errors, biases, and omissions. It is not always clear
what license is best in terms of getting industry participation,
attracting independent developers, managing content fairly, maximizing
intellectual capital appreciation, and avoiding legal liability. That
is one reason there are the many different licenses in existence (and
yet everyone begs "please don't make yet another license for review").
A first step in deciding on a license is to decide what the creators of
the license (and other participants) want to accomplish (the goals of
the project). Once that is done, one can choose or create licenses most
likely to accomplish those goals. When creating any license, one is to
an extent crafting a "constitution" for a collaborative effort. Of
course, the organizations that work with such systems may themselves
have their own constitutions, and one needs to be aware of the extent
to which those constitutions will complement or clash.

The
simplest possible agreement on licensing is to place the entire project
into the public domain. A project agreement can simply be a statement
that "everything contributed is placed in the public domain".
Discussing why the group should or should not do this will lead to an
understanding of how people working on the project feel about issues
like IP, ownership, trust, recognition, control, hope, fears, lawyers,
history, collaboration, and so on.

Communication tools and data standards

Collaboration
is best supported by extensible tools which store data in
well-understood and open data formats. One example of an open source
extensible tool is Squeak http://www.squeak.org
Smalltalk. It runs on a wide variety of operating systems including
Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. It has an active user community
interested in a wide variety of topics including educational
simulation. It supports email, web browsing and real-time collaboration.

Any
long term collaboration will produce many works which will be shared
and refined over a long period of time, during which tools may change.
It is imperative that the work produced be independent of any specific
proprietary format (such as Microsoft Word Doc file format). Some
non-proprietary formats include XML, SGML, HTML, and ASCII.
Additionally, specific protocols used by open source tools, even if
they are only used by one tool, can be considered open formats, since
the tool could conceivably be modified to output in different formats,
and since one can understand the file format because the source of the
tool that produced it is available. The key thing is that the data is
in a well understood format that can be migrated to better formats used
by better tools as they become available.

In
the future, people may develop tools that better track what specific
piece of intellectual property is under what license, making more
feasible the management of large projects with numerous licenses. Such
tools might give one the option to, say, eliminate from a distributed
collection all material with specific objectionable licenses.

What can be learned from open source communities

What
follows is a cursory overview of open source development efforts. There
are both successes and cautionary tales to consider, but it is
important to remember that large numbers of people are already
collaborating and have been doing so for years. Collaboratively
developed language communities include Lisp, Scheme, Forth, GCC, Python
(JPython, CPython, Stackless), and Squeak. Collaboratively developed
operating systems include IBM VM software (before the mid 1980s
Object-Code-Only policy) and recently Linux and Sun's JINI.
Collaboratively developed applications include Apache, Mozilla, Tek,
Emacs, Sendmail, and the BI Open Hyperdocument System. Collaboratively
developed web sites include Everything2, DMOZ (the Open Directory
Project with 2,565,276 sites, 35,850 editors, and 360,320 categories),
Slashdot, the Educational Object Economy, and SourceForge (with over
19,000 projects and 153,000 registered developers). The community
centered around the Free Software Foundation's GPL license has produced
many of the applications that run on Linux. Individuals belonging to
standards committees like the IEEE Standards Committee or World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) have cooperated to create standards. Even the
journal The Economist has noticed the open source movement and its effect on the economy with an article in its April12th, 2001 issue http://www.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=568269.

This
sort of effort need not be constrained to just programming or
standards. There are also fairly open collaborative communities
centered around non-programming issues. For example, Village Earth http://www.villageearth.org
produces the Appropriate Technology CD-ROM, which grew from an effort to
collect 10,000 documents on appropriate technology and make them
available on Microfiche (indexed by the Appropriate Technology
Sourcebook). The non-profit Isles Inc.http://www.isles.org,
which was originally conceived to create habitable islands in the
Caribbean, has been for decades actively engaged in rehabilitating
parts of Trenton, New Jersey through community gardens and related
efforts. The Foresight Institute http://www.foresight.orghas helped coordinate work on nanotechology, including issues relating to its safe use. The Humanities Library http://www.humaninfo.org
is creating a vast library of information for use in developing nations,
primarily from UN documents put under the GPL license or other licenses
allowing free redistribution. [Update: See also the Buckminster Fuller Institute's Comprehensive Design initiative.]

Some well-documented successes have been the Free Software Foundation's GNU tools and General Public License (GPL), Linux http://www.linux.org (which included GNU tools), and Apache http://www.apache.org,
the most popular web server. Since so much coverage exists on these
projects, we will not review these in detail. But in general, each has
a clear license that covers works created in a modular fashion by a
large number of people who share somewhat common purposes. By contrast,
consider IP issues that have affected three smaller open source
projects in which we have participated.

The
Squeak Smalltalk project has encountered issues because of a
non-modular and monolithic distribution and because of a lack of
clarity as to what license various contributions are under (in part
because of this monolithic distribution). This makes Squeak more risky
for large scale ventures to use. It's not that these risks can't be
managed with effort; it is just that they create another hurdle for
participation in the community.

Another collaborative project, an effort to create an “Open Hyperdocument System” led by the Bootstrap Institutehttp://www.bootstrap.org
(BI), has suffered from an initial centralized IP license strategy.
Stanford University and BI wanted to ensure that they could rebroadcast
a video course related to the effort, so they required each participant
in the effort to agree to a blanket “permission to use” on any
contribution for any purpose. This blanket permission included a
provision making the contributor liable for all costs if someone sued
either Stanford or the BI because of the contribution made by that
participant. The permission statement included no language that allowed
the contributor to withdraw the contribution, for example if it was
found to unintentionally infringe a software patent. While this seemed
like a sensible legal strategy for Stanford, it also created an
unequitable ownership model and a large liability for contributors.
This has reduced the likelihood people would want to contribute
significant works to that project.

As a third example, the Python http://www.python.org
programming community went through a period where the Python license was
suddenly re-interpreted to cover only the work done by the project's
lead developer (Guido van Rossum) prior to his employment at a
particular non-profit (CNRI). At about the same time Guido van Rossum
decided to move to another organization, CNRI changed the Python
licensing terms, claiming that new contributions to Python were never
formally licensed. This caused an uproar in the community of
contributors. This is still an ongoing problem because the new license
is not considered to be compatible with the GPL. [Update: This Python GPL incompatability issue was resolved shortly after this was originally written.]

All
of these projects (Squeak, Bootstrap, and Python) have quite
interesting and vibrant communities, are worthy of support, and are
moving to resolve these issues. We have participated in all of them and
gained much from that participation. We bring up the issues we have
experienced in participating in them only as cautionary examples of
what can go wrong if licensing issues are not addressed well at the
start of an effort, with continual follow-through during the life of
the effort.

Current space-related collaborations

There
are several space-settlement related collaborations hosted by
organizations such as SSI, the Artemis Society, LunaCorp, the Living
Universe Foundation (LUF), the Mars Society, PERMANENT, and NASA. There
are also many discussions about space settlement on internet
newsgroups. We can divide these collaborations into two large
categories: general and advocacy-related collaboration.

The
first category involves supporting various collaborations related to
space settlement without one specific vision. This includes NASA and
the activity on internet newsgroups. NASA and space newsgroups on the
surface seem like broad collaborations, but they demonstrate what can
happen without proper attention to licensing for continued
collaboration.

At
NASA, almost anything developed by NASA employees is effectively put
into the public domain (since they are government employees). However,
the bulk of NASA development is done by NASA contractors, and current
rules allow such contractors to retain the IP rights to anything they
produce for NASA. Typically the only requirement is that the government
has a royalty-free license to use the work for government endeavors.
The net effect is that most space related government supported works
such as the design of the NASA space shuttle are not put into the
public domain, but instead are effectively owned piecemeal by the
contractors. This means that if a thousand collaborators wanted to get
together and improve the space shuttle design, they could not do so
without acquiring licenses from every contractor involved.

In
internet newsgroups, there is a presumption that each individual
message may be archived, copied, or quoted. However, in the absence of
explicit licenses for each and every post, anyone who uses such posts
to make significant derived works risks moving beyond “fair use”. The
fair use boundary is fuzzy, and this lack of precision prevents the use
of the newsgroup model for collaborative development of large works.

The
second category of collaboration involves promoting a specific vision
of space settlement, with attendant detailed scenarios. Variations
within the second category include the location of interest (e.g. Mars,
the Moon, the Asteroids, or the rings of Saturn) and the bootstrap
process that will make the settlement viable (e.g. selling power,
materials, microgravity, entertainment, mementos, tourism, or even
effectively condos). In order to fund their continued operations, these
organizations typically take donations and/or sell goods, services, or
intellectual property related to their mission. The organizations
include non-profits (e.g. SSI, the Mars Society, LUF), for-profits
(SpaceDev, SpaceHab, LunaCorp), primarily individual efforts
(PERMANENT), and mixes (the Artemis Society and spinoffs). Most of
these groups effectively are centralized producers of intellectual
property.

What
IP issues do these space-settlement related collaborations face?
Essentially, each organization produces intellectual property with a
plan to sell it to maintain a revenue stream to support continued
operations. Whether that IP is in the form of newsletters, conference
proceedings, broadcasts from the international space station, lunar
theme-park designs, or CD-ROMs with images and software makes little
difference. In order to sustain their missions, these organization
directly or indirectly create high barriers to the use of their
intellectual property for other derived works. The fact that they might
charge for a copy of a CD-ROM is not the problem; the problem is that
someone cannot take these images and reorganize them in new ways in a
derived work without explicitly obtaining permission. But on the other
hand, there is no way the creating organization can give blanket
permission for derived works without reducing its own revenue stream.
The internet makes possible far-flung collaborations on space
settlement, but the approach of selling IP creates a basic conflict
between an organization's larger mission (to promote space settlement)
and the details of how it realizes that mission. How can this conflict
be resolved?

There
are no easy answers to the question of who should fund space settlement
organizations. In practice, support comes from multiple sources such as
government grants, foundation grants, individual donations, and sales
of intellectual property. However, it is in the decision to sell IP
(implying the restriction of its distribution and the ability of others
to create derived works) that perhaps most space settlement
organizations take a wrong turn as far as promoting their larger
mission. Participating in the kinds of “open source” collaborations the
internet makes possible requires that organizations forgo erecting high
barriers to IP use and adopt “open source” licenses for some or all of
their works. An organization might be rightfully concerned that it will
have fewer members if all of its newsletters and conference proceedings
are online (with some permission to create derived works). On the other
hand, broader distribution sometimes engenders broader support. And if
the freely available intellectual property is of high quality, it may
become the definitive reference platform from which other efforts are
built. Proprietary intellectual property that doesn't fit into the
larger ongoing collaboration may be passed by or reinvented.

The
most collaborative project thus far in terms of distributed IP
production using the internet is arguably the Living Universe
Foundation (derived from Marshall Savage's The Millennial Project).
LUF maintains a collaboratively developed web site (called a WIKI)
where all users can edit pages from their web browser. LUF's project
origination policy is fairly decentralized. This is the organization
that most closely approximates an idea of fine-grained collaborative
development towards specific space settlement goals.

However,
even the LUF could potentially increase the degree of collaboration
through more attention to intellectual property issues. For example,
the LUF web site puts the user on notice that all material is
copyrighted by the foundation or the authors. The terms of service
(from the hosting provider) give no explicit rights to use any of the
web site content in any way. This parallels to an extent the situation
of an internet newsgroup. One of the LUF projects is to make a related
simulation, and the licensing for that project is under discussion. We
would suggest that LUF needs to grapple with these issues further. The
fact that they are discussing open source licensing options for their
simulation is very encouraging.

One issue with LUF is that many of the ideas and initial imagery on the web site are drawn from the book The Millennial Project,
which is itself a copyrighted work. While that author has given LUF
permission to use some parts of that work, it is not clear how far that
permission extends to further derivative works. This is another example
of how intellectual property issues can quickly bog down collaboration.
The point of this is not to denigrate LUF, which is trying to
accomplish great things and has a committed number of volunteers who
put much effort into the project. The point is to say that even the
energy of committed volunteers is not enough until these intellectual
property issues are addressed. Otherwise, LUF risks encountering the
same issues that have impeded the progress of many other collaborative
projects.

It
is important to realize that there are “invisible” collaborators in any
project. Invisible collaborators look at a project and discard it
because of some flaw they see in its approach or its agreements. We
believe that proper up-front attention to intellectual property
licensing issues and the mutual trust they support may help turn some
“invisible” collaborators into real collaborators.

Some rough-and-ready rules

Based
on our experiences with the above organizations and others, these are
six IP-related needs individuals and organizations must address to
promote collaboration:

a clear license for each modular contribution,

a
signed statement of originality or permission to use included IP of
others (or assignment of copyright) for any significant contribution
(more than a few lines); at least explicit email permission for shorter
things,

a coordinated repository of permissions and an audit trail of changes to collaborative works,

community awareness of these issues and education of new members on these issues,

collaboration tools that support licensing needs, such as tracking licenses or promoting modularity of contributions, and

advance decisions on at least one acceptable license for collaborative work products.

Modularity
distinguishes clear boundaries between contributions and allows them to
fall under independent licenses. Modularity may not always be possible
with finely linked systems (such as email threads or interwoven
objects). To the extent that modularity is possible and promoted,
problematical contributions, such as ones without clear licenses or
ones that infringe other intellectual property, can be cleanly removed
and/or replaced.

SourceForge
provides free web hosting for over 19,000 open source projects. An
indirect benefit of SourceForge has been to force all 19,000 of those
projects to be explicit about the terms of their license in order to
gain the benefits of SourceForge. Not all projects on SourceForge are
software related, so it could conceivably serve as a resource for
efforts to collaboratively design space settlements as long as they are
willing to share their results under a specific open source license.

Conclusion

This
paper outlines many of the factors that must be taken into account in
collaborating on the design of space settlement. Hopefully this
information will help inspire individuals to take their own steps to
establishing productive collaborations with others who have similar
goals. We are not lawyers; these are our own hard won views on these
issues, not any sort of legal advice. This document in not intended to
be a definitive source of information about intellectual property law.
Rather, it is intended to spark discussion in the large space
settlement community, which will hopefully involve qualified
intellectual property lawyers who can address these issues with legal
precision.